Matt O'Sullivan (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last Friday I was very pleased to present the interim report of the Senate Education and Employment References Committee on the issue of increasing disruption in Australian school classrooms, and I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

Firstly, I would like to thank my fellow committee members, including the deputy chair, Senator Tony Sheldon. Our committee is quite a collegiate team. I note that Senator Allman-Payne is in the chamber, and she'll follow me in speaking on this. While we came to different positions on the issue, we did find a lot of common ground throughout the inquiry, and I certainly appreciated her collegiality and dedication to the issues and that she was present at most of the hearings that we were able to hold. I'd like to thank those that made submissions and appeared in front of the committee at hearings. I particularly want to thank Professor Tom Bennett, the independent behaviour adviser to the Department for Education in the UK. He joined us for a short video call all the way from London. It was quite late in the evening for him, and I appreciated him appearing before the committee.

The 2018 OECD Programme for International Student Assessment ranked Australia 69th out of 76 countries in terms of classroom discipline, meaning that we have some of the most disruptive classrooms in the world. Not only was I shocked to read that, but I was also deeply troubled. We know that we have a great education system here in Australia, and we know that it is essential that our children receive a quality education. Yet we're seeing a third of our students fail to meet the new proficiency standards for literacy and numeracy. We're seeing massive rates of teacher attrition and burnout. As adults—parents and carers charged with raising and nurturing the next generation—we'll do them a disservice if we leave them functionally illiterate or innumerate. In the words of Katharine Birbalsingh, headmistress of Michaela Community School in the UK, 'Being compassionate with a child, caring and loving a child means holding the line.' We need evidence based methods of teaching and learning to help our students learn in the classroom.

The Australian Education Research Organisation have been calling for teachers to be taught the science of learning and for it to be mandated as core content for our teachers in training. We know that these methods, including explicit instruction, formative assessment and mastery learning, are effective because the research actually shows that they are. And it shows that this is in fact how a child's brain learns. As they say, the proof is in the pudding. We can see these methods in action in classrooms right around the country.

As part of the inquiry process, the committee conducted some site visits to schools that we heard were achieving some wonderful results. It was really important that this committee took an evidence based approach and looked for the strengths in our school system so that we could provide some clear recommendations that pointed to what is actually working. We wanted to see firsthand who was doing this and who was providing best practice in our schools. I've spoken about Challis Community Primary School many times in this place—I've stood here and done that—and I continue to champion this incredible school that's not too far from where I live and where my office is. It's a great school, but it is in a very low-socioeconomic area, and therefore it's achieving better than postcode results in the suburbs of Armadale. Dawson Park Primary School is another great school in Western Australia. It's another stellar example of a school that is defying the odds, and it's also achieving better than postcode results, with NAPLAN results improving each year. On the other side of the country, we visited Marsden Road Public School in Liverpool, outside of Sydney. More than 90 per cent of the student population come from a non-English-speaking background, but their academic outcomes are improving year on year.

There are many things that these three schools have in common with each other, and I'll take you through just a few of them. Firstly, they have clear expectations around behaviour. They have adequate training for staff around these expectations and, importantly, how they can apply them in the classroom. The consistent and fair application is also there when they apply these rules and expectations. In addition to all that—and I think this is possibly the most important factor—these three schools are led by very courageous principals. The tenacity and vision that these principals display are phenomenal, and I want to point them out. Firstly, there's Lee Musumeci at Challis Community Primary School, who's wonderful. I've known Lee for a long time. She's magnificent. The leadership that she's shown—I think she's been at that school for over two decades. There's Pauline Johnson at Dawson Park Primary School and Manisha Gazula at Marsden Road Public School. They're three wonderful principals. We should give them an Order of Australia medal, I think; they're magnificent—if they haven't already got one, that is.

The schools led by these three women are exceptional examples of how we can do the right thing by our children and provide them with a strong foundation in literacy and numeracy. Wouldn't it be fantastic if we could just copy and paste them and what they do in their school and have every school-aged child in Australia benefit from the resolute and compassionate leadership of these magnificent women. Short of that, we should ensure that everyone who chooses to become a teacher and enrols in the university of their choice learns the necessary skills that they will need to rely on in the classroom.

Teachers are crying out for more support, and we are seeing more and more reports of burnout. That's why the report calls for mandated core content for initial teacher education courses to include evidence-based behaviour and classroom management strategies. Reducing disruption and disorder in the classroom isn't about just punishing students. It's also not about piling more work onto our teachers, forcing them to play parent and teacher at the same time. It's actually about learning. It's about freeing up more teaching time. It's about providing a calm, predictable and safe environment for all students to be able to learn in. The key to that is having a whole-school approach, a whole-school commitment to behaviour, and this can be achieved by introducing behaviour curriculum.

We know that behaviour is learnt. No child is born knowing how to behave; they're taught how to behave—how to share, how to take turns—and the fortunate ones are taught this from birth, by their parents and by the community in which they're in. But we know not everyone has been provided with that. If behaviour is learnt it can be taught. Behaviour needs to be taught explicitly to students, with clear expectations communicated by the teacher. A behaviour curriculum sets out the expected behaviours and values of a school, and it's not just a list of prohibited behaviours; it represents the key habits and routines required in schools. Again, it's about making schools and classrooms safe, predictable and equitable places for all students to learn. This is how we can set up our students for success.

This is a pivotal moment, with the National School Reform Agreement currently in the process of being negotiated. We want to see the recommendations in this report incorporated into the next National School Reform Agreement, which will be implemented from 2025 onwards. We know that these reforms will take time to make their way through our universities, schools and classrooms. Fast-tracking these reforms is key to turning these important results around.

The 2022 PISA results were released earlier this week. While our results in reading, science and mathematics remain relatively stable, as pointed out by Lisa De Bortoli, a senior research fellow at the Australian Council for Education Research:

… it's important to recognise that our position in the top 10 is largely due to the performance of other countries dropping below ours …

Barely half of Australian students achieve the national proficiency standards—51 per cent in maths, 58 per cent in science and 57 per cent in reading. We need the political willpower to follow through with what the evidence is telling us to do. We know that evidence based methods of pedagogy, like explicit instruction and formative assessment, are based on the science of learning. Teachers are crying out for more support. We need to ensure that they are all equipped with the skills and strategies that they rely on in the classroom. It won't be an easy process, and I'm not standing here saying that this is a silver bullet. There's a heck of a lot of responsibility that parents need to take, and of course that needs to happen. Kids should be packing their backpack on the way to school with an expectation to learn. It won't be an easy process, but we should remember that the greatest cruelty we could do to our children is to rob them of their futures by allowing this problem to escalate, cutting down the time that they spend learning in class and ultimately leaving them illiterate and innumerate.

Debate adjourned.